GOP’s implosion is bad for everyone: Tim Rutten

Back when there still were serious Marxist thinkers with whom to reckon, they used to worry a great deal about “social contradictions.”

Ultimately, they divided them into “antagonistic contradictions” — which had to be resolved — and “non-antagonistic contradictions” that simply could be ignored.

Our American system, by contrast, accepts contradiction, which is in some large measure what has allowed us to become the diverse and dynamic nation that has adapted its sense of itself — sometimes painfully — to more than two centuries of dizzying social, economic and technological change. The Declaration of Independence established common values — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — that are actively evolving rather than fixed, which has allowed us to engage and participate in history rather than pretend to stand outside it. We do not aspire to some fixed hierarchical order or perfected workers’ paradise; we use life and liberty to pursue happiness, a condition which each of our more than 300 people is left to define and redefine for themselves.

What our system does depend upon is constructive tension. The founders did not anticipate this, but the genius of their political and social construction is that it has been sufficiently flexible to allow these tensions to emerge and test themselves against historical experience. Thus, we know now that our economy works best and most justly when coherently organized workers with reasonable aspirations sit on one side of the bargaining table and strong and effective management sits on the other. Our legal system relies on the tension between able prosecutors and principled defense attorneys. The tension between an essentially secular state and the churches has made us the most religious people in the developed world while avoiding the pitfall of a confessional state. Perhaps most important, the health of our political system relies on a productive tension between two political parties equally engaged by a serious interest in governing.

That’s why the ongoing implosion of the national Republican Party is a matter of concern to everyone and not just to those registered in the GOP. Consider the situation in California, which has become one of the bluest of all blue states because the state party that once produced national leaders like Earl Warren, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan destroyed itself. California’s Republicans closed their eyes to demographic change, threw up a rampart of rigid social conservatism, and converted themselves into “the party of no,” whose only role in Sacramento was to obstruct. In other words, they pulled in upon themselves in a way that Lenin’s old Bolsheviks would have recognized, since they lived by his maxim: “Better fewer, but better.” Like the California GOP, their ideology was pure. As it turned out, they were lousy at governing.

In California, the Republicans’ mania for ideological purity, insistence that they could stand apart from historical change and reflexive hostility to the politics of compromise have made them essentially irrelevant. As a consequence, every statewide office now is occupied by a Democrat and the party enjoys super majorities in both legislative chambers. That has allowed California to get moving again, but anybody who thinks it’s a healthy situation for the long term is kidding themselves. However much one may approve Gov. Jerry Brown’s current leadership and the Legislature’s rediscovered effectiveness, sooner or later the kind of unchecked majority the Democrats’ now enjoy will lead to excess and abuse.

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Unfortunately, the national Republican Party now seems bent on replicating their California experience. A trio of Tea Party-infused senators — Ted Cruz of Texas, Kentucky’s Rand Paul and Utah’s Mike Lee, abetted by former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, now chief of the Heritage Foundation — are trying to persuade their colleagues to bring the government to a halt in an attempt to defund President Barack Obama’s health care reforms. They even have expressed a willingness to play chicken with raising the debt limit, even though refusal to do that would call into question the full faith and credit of the U.S. government and almost certainly trigger an international financial meltdown. They’re reportedly getting a wide and sympathetic hearing among GOP members of the House.

As a longtime congressional aide who asked to remain anonymous recently told a reporter for the Talkingpointsmemo website, most candidates who run for Congress claim that they’re not politicians. It’s one of the system’s now obligatory hypocrisies. The problem with the Tea Party Republicans whose numbers are growing in Congress is that they really aren’t politicians. They disdain the elements of effective politics — listening, bargaining, compromise — and feel no obligation whatsoever to govern, since they conceive government itself as the enemy.

At the same time, most of these insurgent officeholders and their supporters appear willing to see their party withdraw and become one whose base is pure, but shrinking — increasingly older, whiter and southern, a political fortress at odds with demographic and historical change. It’s become increasingly clear, for example, that the Republicans have to stop kicking the country’s growing number of Latino voters in the face — a habit that doomed the GOP in California when it linked its fate to the anti-immigrant Proposition 187. Overwhelming Latino support for President Obama was one of the factors that sank Mitt Romney in the last general election, but the House GOP now insists on blocking any attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, a make-or-break issue for most Latinos.

Gerrymandering has handed the House Republicans more than 100 congressional districts that have virtually no Latino voters, and they apparently feel they can be cavalier about whether or not their party ever broadens its base. In 11 out of the 15 California congressional districts held by the Republicans, 25 percent of the voters are Latinos, and so many of the state’s GOP congressional representatives are amenable to comprehensive reform. Their realism is lost on their colleagues nationally, however, and so other state parties have decided that their best strategy is to keep as many African American and Latino voters from the polls as possible.

Voter fraud is one of those illusionary problems in America today. It simply doesn’t occur on any large scale — anywhere. Even so, in the wake of the conservative Supreme Court’s recent assault on the Voting Rights Act, Republican majorities and governors in North Carolina and Texas have rammed through highly restrictive voter ID laws designed to discourage minorities, the poor and the elderly from exercising the franchise. Texas has pushed ahead with a dubious redistricting plan that U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder said Thursday the Department of Justice will sue to overturn.

As one of the GOP’s most eminent African American members, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Thursday, “These kinds of actions do not build on the base. It just turns people away.”

That’s bad for the Republicans and, ultimately, for our entire political system.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com